The first impression of the television producer and director Christopher Burstall, who has died aged 77 of a heart attack, was of an imposing man of patrician authority, impeccably dressed and courtly in manner. Beneath this BBC gravitas, however, was a startlingly innovative programme-maker.

His early BBC1 Omnibus film Tyger Tyger (1967) proved to be one of television's most influential arts documentaries. Up to then, the likely approach to the poet William Blake would have been to produce a full biography from birth to death. Burstall chose to concentrate on one single poem, Tyger Tyger. He filmed experts, enthusiasts, schoolchildren, even a taxidermist who had stuffed such a beast, reciting the poem, analysing it, relating it to their own lives and experience. The film became an expertly assembled mosaic of performance, comment and illustration. Burstall had invented a genre, the full-length documentary essay on an individual work of art.

Tyger Tyger also democratised the analysis of art on television, hitherto the preserve of experts and mandarins. Burstall's lifelong preoccupation with making the arts accessible was admired by the writer Anthony Burgess. When Burgess published his own attempt to introduce James Joyce to a popular audience, Here Comes Everybody (1965), he dedicated it to his good friend Burstall.

Another ground-breaking Omnibus documentary followed. The novelist Graham Greene had agreed to be interviewed at length, but on one condition - he would not appear on screen. Burstall turned Greene's reluctance to advantage, recording a conversation with him while travelling from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express. Burstall himself appeared on camera as Greene's interlocutor - or rather his sleeve, arm, hand and tape recorder appeared - but Greene remained resolutely out of sight. The passage of time was marked in a suitably mysterious Greeneian way by the changing scenery, fleetingly observed state borders outside the compartment window, and a steadily mounting hill of cigarette stubs in the ashtray. It was a brilliantly inventive, playful solution. Graham Greene - The Hunted Man (1968) inspired many subsequent programmes involving reluctant or recalcitrant subjects.

Burstall experimented early with the documentary-drama form. In Whoosh (1966), a study of HG Wells, he interweaved interviews with dramatised extracts from Wells's early life. In 1970, he made On Trial, a trilogy of dramatised programmes based on key trials of the 20th century.

Even while these programmes were being transmitted, Burstall had been gripped by a contemporary court case in the US, the long-running Chicago conspiracy trials of Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and five other leaders of anti-Vietnam war protests. Before the trial ended, he persuaded BBC bosses to let him make a dramatic reconstruction of it. He set his team to make a digest of 23,000 pages of the courtroom transcripts, from which he created a script in collaboration with Stuart Hood. On Trial - The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1970) won a Bafta award for best specialised production.

Burstall was a confident director of actors. The Chicago trial drama is full of fine, natural performances. The actress Susannah York, who appeared in his Poet of Disenchantment (1968) speaking the work of WH Auden, recalls how apprehensive she was at the prospect of performing poetry. Burstall advised her to go out alone into the open air and declaim the poems at the top of her voice. "So I took myself out onto the Yorkshire moors and yelled Auden out in the driving wind and rain and I had a revelation. I realised you don't need a special voice for poetry," York recalled. "It stood me in good stead for the rest of my career."

He had an assurance that could shake the most seasoned TV executive. I was a witness to his powers of persuasion as he sold to the reluctant BBC1 controller Bill Cotton a six-part series on the art and philosophy of ancient Greece, to include extracts from classical Greek tragedies and to be presented by Burstall himself. Cotton, mentor of Morecambe and Wise, commissioner of the Blankety Blank quiz game, clearly felt this was a cultural event too far for the BBC's popular channel, but he caved in and took the series. Burstall would not come to remember The Greeks (1980) as his happiest venture, but always stuck to his guns on the principle of popularising "difficult" subjects. Years later, he observed in an interview for BBC4, the distinction between high and low art "isn't a very valid one. Good art, art that is worthwhile, has a very broad spectrum."

He took special delight in the visual arts, and his series on painters included a trilogy for Omnibus on the Prado's masterpieces, A Spanish Legacy (1978). He insisted that great works of art had to be filmed in situ, and he became a fixture at the Prado museum in Madrid, where the staff knew him as Don Cristobal. In the mid-1980s he continued to explore the great masters in a happy collaboration with the expert Lawrence Gowing, producing three series of programmes, each called Three Painters (1984, 1986 and 1988). They analysed in detail the work of Masaccio, Rembrandt, Cézanne and others using the simplest of television lecture formats, but the results were beautiful to look at, the ideas challenging, and the programmes well received.

In 1972 he conducted one of the last interviews with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth while his three children played in her sculpture-filled garden at St Ives, Cornwall. They had been fired early on with his passion for knowledge and experience. Family holidays were as often as not Burstall's personal version of the Grand Tour.

Burstall was born in Bebington, Cheshire, the only son of Molly, a schoolteacher, and Hal, an accountant. At the age of nine he was a wartime evacuee to Carlisle, then attended the Wirral grammar school, where he became head boy. Offered two university scholarships, one at Oxford, one at Cambridge, he first completed his national service, during which he was commissioned, and spent a year in army intelligence. He read English at King's College, Cambridge, then switched to a law degree.

A year as a scholar at the Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia led to a passion for Italian art and culture. By his own account, he also played a good deal of poker. In 1954 he took up a general traineeship at the BBC, where he would spend the whole of his working life.

After a spell on Panorama, he made films for Huw Wheldon's Monitor on musicians, painters and writers, including Evelyn Waugh, Joyce and Jane Austen. He co-produced the first BBC series on literature, Bookmark, and in 1965 found his natural home in the music and arts department run by Humphrey Burton.

He chose to retire early in 1990 after suffering a heart attack and undergoing bypass surgery. He bought a silver convertible in which he and his wife Sue explored Europe. Still sporting silk shirts and a panama hat - we used to wonder if he was the last man in England to wear a cravat - he became something of a local character on his home turf, Ham Common in Surrey. He took up golf and woodwork, becoming an expert cabinetmaker, and he was appointed a church guardian of his local parish. He is survived by Sue, his three children, Sarah, Emma and James, and six grandchildren.

Christopher Burstall, television producer, born 10 March 1932; died 2 June 2009